Feature: 5 Reasons to Use WordPress as CMS

ZMAng sent in a great article to go along with the series he has on blogHelper relating to WordPress as a CMS.

If you are an experienced user of WordPress (WP) and want to setup a non-blog website – perhaps a portfolio site, news/magazine site or even an e-commerce site – you might just want to skip the more robust content management systems (CMS) most people tend to suggest, like Drupal and XOOPS, and consider using WordPress for your CMS-oriented task instead.

Why? Because…

It Can Be Done, and (Quite) Easily TooIf you were avoiding WP for your news or portfolio site because you thought WP could only be used as a blogging platform, think again. You would be surprised at the multitude of ways WP can be used as a CMS, and how easily you can customise it to do your bidding. The huge repository of currently available WP plugins already ensures that your job is half done.

You’re Familiar With ItThis is probably the No. 1 reason why anyone would want to use WP as a CMS. Familiarity not only breeds trust in the system, but also the ability and expertise to customise it to fit your every need. For those who love to tweak the stuff they use, you’ll be saving a lot of time in the long-run from not having to learn/master a whole new CMS. While you might save time initially from using a CMS more specific to your needs, what if you need to bring in a new function or two?

It Integrates With Your Blog PerfectlyI’m going hit you (or is it get hit with?) with a big duh! here. There’s no need to worry about integrating your blog with whatever CMS you’re using for the rest of your site if you use WP for everything. Imagine having to integrate your e-commerce CMS with WP. Urghh…

It’s Very User-FriendlyMore robust and feature-filled CMSes tend to be weak(er) in user-friendliness and high on complexity (think Typo3). Teaching beginners to handle WP is a much, much easier task. Here, I’m referring more towards the front-end of things with regard to community sites with multiple contributors, where it’s likely that the people who publish the majority of articles are less experienced CMS users.

There are Tons of Great Themes/Templates for ItI challenge you to find another CMS with a better stock of free themes/templates (in terms of both quality and quantity). In fact, I’m willing to risk my neck and say that many of the more feature-laden CMSes have a real lack of free and great themes. But just on Blogging Pro alone, you’ll find a huge selection of great WP themes you can customise to fit your CMS needs. And if you think all WP themes are completely blog-centric, here’s one to debunk that myth.

But nothing is ever perfect, including WordPress, so there are downsides to using WP as a CMS. More on that, and the technical details of using WP as a CMS at my joint. So, make sure you consider them first before finalising your decision. Heh, no free tech. support if something fails, ‘kay?

A WP use recommended WP to me and I got hooked, it does everything you need from a CMS, and more, via plugins. I’ve not yet come across a requirement for my blog, that a plguin for WP has not fulfilled.

I’m checking this out at the moment and it is looking promising “using wordpress as a CMS”. BUT the cms side does not ‘seem’ to have RSS or ATOM support. Is this true? Have the WordPress team any plans to extend the feed features?

I would definitively NOT compare WordPress, Xoops and Drupal – this is like comparing, say mountain shoes with flipflops with elegant black lether shoes (no relation to any of the three CMS in this example).

All are shoes as well as all are CMS. It really depends WHAT the goal is you want to persui to find out which app is the “best” for a particular purpose. You wouldn’t go mountain walking in flip flops or were black lether shoes at the beach, would you?!

Xoops is a typical Web 1.0 Bulliten Board and Community System. It has a rigid structure and is intended for a particular use: build a web site that can be used to discuss a topic with many people. Good Software but rather one goal. Xoops can be bent to do other things, as most CMS, but I would not recommend that as you might run into a scalablility problem and simply because, for larger stuff, Xoops would become TOO complex.

WordPress is a brilliant blogging tool. So if you publish content in a (time-) linear way but also want to categorieze this content for a more non-linear content approach, and add some static pages, WordPress is great!

Drupal does NOT fit into all of the above as well as it DOES fit into all of the above categories:
First off, it is NOT a typical blogging tool or typical CMS or typical community system in the way that a lot in Drupal is much much more abstracted and NOT ment to do one particular thing. So Drupal in fact is much more like Ruby on Rails, although not as open and as versatile as RoR (but compared to RoR, you do not need to write EVERYTHING from scratch): it is a web application framework. It offers you the most common needed things for any kind of web site, like user authentication and basic CMS features. But then come the modules, that, compared to Xoops and Joomla, are much more on a “meta” level and higher abstracted. An example: a calendar and event system for Xoops or Joomla or WordPress does JUST that. Offer an event scheduleing and event display system. Drupal however offers this as a basic functionality and you can even built a web site for an airline offering a flight schedule, with is similar to an event callendar, but needs a lot more logic as well as also two date and time fields: one for departure one for arrival – alongside additional related info like aircraft type and destination info.

Xoops offers a huge array of prefab layouts. But they tend to all look quite alike. Drupal, from out of the box, is the same, sadly, but this is due to the fact, that PHPtemplate, it’s template engine, has only been made default template engine since that last release. In fact, PHPtemplate is the most powerfull CMS template engines I have ever seen, enabling “bending” the CMS output in ANY given way, even make an event calendar output look like an airline flight schedule, which cannot be done with standard modules/extensions in ANY other CMS around if these modules/extensions haven’t been written for exaclty this purpose.

WordPress is rather limited in functionality even with modules available, but this is because the WP guys want to to be a GREAT blogging platform, not an all-round tool!

So Drupal is really the only all-rounder there is, really, but also one that is at first look easy, but at second look extremely deep from a knowledge point of view and most people might be better off with more easy systems, like WP or Xoops, but, as a conclusion: it also depends on WHAT you want to do!

I’ve used wp as a cms for two sites, one with ecommerce and one without, and I’ve quite pleased. For the ecommerce, I created a page for every product before I found out a better way to do each product as a post, which is what I’ll be doing for an ecommerce blogsite I’m working on right now for myself.

Steve: The comparison I gave was actually more as a point of reference than a true comparison. You’re definitely right when you say that we can’t compare Drupal, XOOPS and WP with each other (I like my WP unique :))

I don’t know. Of course it can be done. Any CMS can be extended to a point where it can serve various purposes. But WordPress is first and foremost a great blogging package. A great, but specialized piece of equipment. I made another decision. I preferred Joomla for my main website and then I tried out the JoomlaBlog tool. It didn’t work for me either. It was way easier (and more powerful) to setup Joomla as the front end package and wrap WordPress into it. That way I could use the strength of both, instead of compromising one for the other.

I’m using WordPress integrated with Joomla and i can see why it can be frustrating since they only sit there side by side but doesn’t really share any realtion to each other. So running WordPress as a CMs i guest you can have full control over your content and not split between two differing systems. Having said that, the integration has been very well implemented by the developer though i guess he must be fighting just to try and wrap the two together as neighbours.

anyway, it would be quite useful to list the actual plugins in your article that can be combined to build WP into a CMS.

I’m actually the designer of Filipino Artisans, one the e-commerce examples you used for WordPress as a CMS on BlogHelper. Thanks for the link, by the way 🙂

The major reason for my selection of WordPress as a CMS over Drupal is basically familiarity (but on the designer/developer’s perspective). I’m a designer by virtue, so I’m really that much of a programmer. Drupal or any of those other CMS would be a difficult shift for me.

Using WordPress as a CMS would probably be best for smaller sites, IMHO. Smaller sites that are basically just “brochure” types. Posts can substitute as “news articles” and pages can be, well, the pages (about us, services, contact). The fact that it’s also easy to control via CSS can also attribute to the fact that my design company is able to offer sites with “CMS” at a lower cost. But if you’re going for more features, Drupal might be a better choice (that’s the only time I’d hire a programmer to integrate my design).

Another factor that made me consider WP as the CMS for my ecommerce site is probably because it’s quite friendly to search engines. I won’t have to spend that much for SEO services, I’ll just have the site “ride” on my other well-ranked sites. The process isn’t as fast as agressive SEO, but it works. 🙂

I have used WordPress as a CMS and I think it is a great solution, however I believe it would be even better if you could somehow use the page slug as a navigation item instead of the page title. This would add much more flexibility in terms of design and choice of titles (not everyone wants their page title to be home for example)

There may be a plugin available but I haven’t found it, and believe me I have searched! Anybody else come across any such plugin or hack?

If you’re using WordPress as a CMS, and you have a high number of “pages (not posts)” then you’re going to hit a wall at some point. Usually around 500+ pages, the saving and creating of new pages will take upwards of 5 minutes. Something about this needs to be done in future versions of WordPress if it’s to be considered a serious mini-CMS system.

I’ve made some web projects (not blog) with WordPress before. If there are not too many pages, you can easily use WordPress as CMS. When you know a lot of what you can do with WP, you almost can do anything. In my experience, Ive also made a website that mix WP and Zencart all together with the same theme.

I was a beginner a couple of years ago to websites. I went the wrong way with Mambo since I wanted to do a content site. Starting from ground zero, it took me a long long time to get it up. I switched to wordpress and things begin to fall into place. Plugins are so much easier for my needs.

I’ve since set up several other sites, all using wordpress. Other CMS have their place if you are skilled or am paying someone to do the changes for you if you are a newbie

I’m so excited to have found this post. I currently use a combination of WordPress and Joomla. Joomla’s great but a bit of an overkill for what I’m after. I’ve always wanted to use WordPress as a CMS but never dared to find out if it could be done for fear of mucking up my site. Your post has given me the courage to go ahead and get my feet wet.

Thx Bro. Another factor that made me consider WP as the CMS for my ecommerce site is probably because it’s quite friendly to search engines. I won’t have to spend that much for SEO services, I’ll just have the site “ride” on my other well-ranked sites. The process isn’t as fast as agressive SEO, but it works. 😀

Thx Bro. Another factor that made me consider WP as the CMS for my ecommerce site is probably because it’s quite friendly to search engines. I won’t have to spend that much for SEO services, I’ll just have the site “ride” on my other well-ranked sites. The process isn’t as fast as agressive SEO, but it works 🙂

I’ve made some web projects (not blog) with WordPress before. If there are not too many pages, you can easily use WordPress as CMS. When you know a lot of what you can do with WP, you almost can do anything. In my experience, Ive also made a website that mix WP and Zencart all together with the same theme.

I was a beginner a couple of years ago to websites. I went the wrong way with Mambo since I wanted to do a content site. Starting from ground zero, it took me a long long time to get it up. I switched to wordpress and things begin to fall into place. Plugins are so much easier for my needs.
I’ve since set up several other sites, all using wordpress. Other CMS have their place if you are skilled o

I have used WordPress as a CMS and I think it is a great solution, however I believe it would be even better if you could somehow use the page slug as a navigation item instead of the page title. This would add much more flexibility in terms of design and choice of titles (not everyone wants their page title to be home for example)

I’m checking this out at the moment and it is looking promising “using wordpress as a CMS”. BUT the cms side does not ‘seem’ to have RSS or ATOM support. Is this true? Have the WordPress team any plans to extend the feed features?

Is it possible to have more then one “entry” that displays two different types of content? I would like to have my blog as my entry, but then also another section on that same page that I can update with a different video every day.

I know you can get a plugin that will allow you to keep a specific post at the top of your blog (adhesive [there is another newer one now]), but that is not what I want to do. I want two have two different editable sections that I can update. Is that possible?

I’m checking this out at the moment and it is looking promising “using wordpress as a CMS”. BUT the cms side does not ‘seem’ to have RSS or ATOM support. Is this true Have the WordPress team any plans to extend the feed features???

For example, complexity is one disadvantage to choosing Drupal, which in my opinion was entirely unimpressive. Configuring Joomla was equally complicated, although easier to get up and running with initially.

For example, complexity is one disadvantage to choosing Drupal, which in my opinion was entirely unimpressive. Configuring Joomla was equally complicated, although easier to get up and running with initially.

Very interesting and certainly worth considering using WP as a CMS in many instances. But under the link “multitude of ways” (above), there is a suggestion that WP can be used in eCommerce to create online catalogues and shopping carts. Well, I have no doubt that it can be done. But why bother when it is probably much easier to use OSCommerce or something similar.

It Can Be Done, and (Quite) Easily Too
If you were avoiding WP for your news or portfolio site because you thought WP could only be used as a blogging platform, think again. You would be surprised at the multitude of ways WP can be used as a CMS, and how easily you can customise it to do your bidding. The huge repository of currently available WP plugins already ensures that your job is half done.

After I read this article I decided to build my website on wordpress, you can visit it and share your comments as well… by the way get rid off all this spam comments… keep up the good work, best regards.

Congratulation ndesign for another wonderful portfolio site. I really really really admire this wonderful site… I just want to share my design as well… What do you think of this site? I design it my own.. Thanks

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[…] Blogging Pro has a post with 5 Reasons to Use WordPress as CMS. If you are an experienced user of WordPress (WP) and want to setup a non-blog website – perhaps a portfolio site, news/magazine site or even an e-commerce site – you might just want to skip the more robust content management systems (CMS) most people tend to suggest, like Drupal and XOOPS, and consider using WordPress for your CMS-oriented task instead. […]

[…] David (of BloggingPro), being on vacation, is currently publishing a set of contributions by external bloggers. Luckily, my contribution was accepted, and was just published today. It’s an article titled 5 Reasons to Use WordPress as a CMS, and is part of the theoretical foundation behind my Using WP as a CMS series. […]

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